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The Trap Door
Previous Chapter ***** The Starbucks, with its espresso-and-cream smell and mumbling, bumbling horde of professionals, provided a more welcome reprieve than I’d anticipated. Either the processed sugar or the ice in my java chip Frappuccino was working wonders on my throbbing head. I apologized to Alicia. I hadn’t slept well, I said. I’d made an appointment with the local psychiatrist my Florida doctor had recommended. She nodded, made me promise to stay home and sleep, and left for the library. I guess I’m a better liar than she is. Maybe I should go to law school. When the throng of business-casual zombies cleared, I saw a familiar face behind the counter. I hadn’t immediately recognized him with his blonde locks covered by a cap. “Travis! You work here?” He grinned at me. “Ansley! Shit, I was going to call you.” “So, this is the day job? Ghost-hunting doesn’t pay the bills?” “My sizzle reel’s on YouTube,” he said. “Any day now you’ll see me on SyFy.” His eyes widened. “By the way, I wanted to tell you. I found some drawings in our attic. I’m pretty sure they were done by that girl you were talking about, Mathilde.” “Did you find anything white and grainy up there, by any chance?” The words sounded ridiculous as I said them. Travis frowned. “What?” “Never mind.” “Speaking of Mathilde, I actually wanted to ask you something.” He looked at me suspiciously. “The other night, were you pushing the planchard?” My stomach dropped. The nausea of the morning made its second appearance. “No. Why would you ask that?” He grabbed my hand and led me to a table, sat across from me, and leaned in conspiratorially. “I tried again,” he said. “I tried to contact her three more times with my Ouija board. I did exactly the same thing we did together - same candles, same incense, even the same time of day. Nothing. The planchard didn’t even shake. So I tried scrying. Then I had Warren hypnotize me.” I snorted. “Your boyfriend is a hypnotist?” “Amateur. The point is, I got nothing. And the only variable is you.” He gave me the same look Alicia had, hours before. The look Luke had given me countless times. Travis. The guy touting the legitimacy of hypnotism and scrying. The single person in my orbit who’d never, once, implied I was crazy. “For the love of Christ, man!” I laughed, suddenly taken by the ridiculousness. “We both felt the same thing that night! It moved like a fucking hamster.” He sighed, nodded. “You’re right. Something weird happened that night, and you were as freaked out as I was.” He giggled. “When my show gets picked up, maybe you and the ghost of Mathilde can be the first episode.” I smiled. “I’ll make an appearance. Or, you can go back to the haunted video store - you know, where your friend heard the little murdered boys crying. Maybe the SyFy geeks will buy your stupid story.” It took me a good five seconds to process what I’d just said. ***** “It’s so lame you can’t go with us.” Micah and I sat on my back porch, soaking up the last of the late-afternoon, weekend sun. Tommy was at basketball practice and Luke’s Math Field Day team met on Saturdays, so the two of us were alone. '' ''“Yeah, it sucks,” Micah chirped. His voice was still the voice of a little boy. “They don’t even curse or talk bad about women,” I continued ranting. “It’s not like we’re going to a Korn concert.” “My mom’s scared there’s going to be people doing pot and I’ll get an asthma attack,” he said. “How did your parents even let you go?” “My mom called Tommy’s mom,” I explained. “Since you’re not going, Tommy’s cousin has an extra ticket, and she said I could give it to Alicia. My mom said that if Alicia went I could go, too.” “Oh.” We sat in silence, watching shadows elongate under the swing set. Micah, normally a chattering windup toy, had been uncharacteristically reticent and morose all afternoon; prone to fits of angst-riddled staring. If Tommy and Luke had been around, their banter would pad the silence. But, alone at dusk on a Saturday, Micah’s personality shift was impossible to ignore. “Dude, what’s your deal lately?” I asked finally. Micah looked up at me, thick, curly bangs falling over his brown eyes. '' ''“You’re moving,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Yeah.” My family’s pending cross-country relocation had hung in the air, like the persistent hum of a faraway lawnmower, since the previous summer. It had been anything but a secret to my three best friends, but it seemed a distant consideration. With schoolwork, video games, and our plots to defeat The Daemon serving as more present concerns, the march of time towards our planned June departure had been easy to ignore. '' ''But Micah saw the boxes on my bedroom floor. My mom was in the process of cleaning out the closet; once stuffed to the gills with old clothes, kid toys, and assorted flotsam and jetsam that didn’t fit anywhere else. If the reality of the situation hadn’t sunk in before, it did that Saturday afternoon. “You’ll still have Tommy and Luke,” I said comfortingly. “I guess.” He frowned. “Luke’s going to be in eighth grade. He won’t want to play with me anymore.” Micah’s lip quivered. I had a sudden impulse to reach out for him, to take him in my arms and cuddle him like a stuffed bear. Then I thought of something better. “We need to kill The Daemon before I leave.” The next hour passed in a burst of energy. We rolled silver polymer clay into snakelike dowels, pinched the ends, and mounted the resulting pikes on golden hilts decorated with the remaining colors - mine, a green and black rabbit; Micah’s, a bright red scorpion. As my mother - eager for break from sorting sawdust-coated baby clothes into “keep” and “donate” piles - baked our creations in the oven, Micah and I hooked the ethernet cable to my family’s boxy PC. “It’s a full moon tonight!” I exclaimed. Outside, in the settling dusk, we excitedly gathered creamy, white jasmine, babbling snippets of strategy. “You and me will battle the AntWalkers with our swords,” I mused. “So long as we’re touching Indestructible Magic Foam, they can’t suck out our souls. Then, Tommy can climb into the trees and look for the Fuzzy Limebushes.” '' ''“They can’t pass the Fuzzy Limebushes,” Micah re-iterated. “And when we’re fighting them off, Luke goes with a flashlight and scares away the Droxies!” “And Tommy can have the Starshine Juice, just in case we don’t kill the Great Bagwurm.” After the jasmine, we gathered avocados, rotting in the dirt after falling from the neighbor’s tree, then ivy leaves, then elderberries. On the porch, we mixed our bounty with salt, Capri Sun, Go-Gurt, Sunny Delight, and Alicia’s Cool Blue Gatorade; alchemy that transformed raw ingredients into Invisibility Serum, Ice Liquid (which would freeze The Daemon’s fire breath on contact), Marigold Pee (to throw off the Droxies, who were attracted to the smell of urine), Elixer of Healing, and Diarrhea Guacamole (to be smeared across The Daemon’s eyes). Then, still-warm swords in hand, we chanted to the full moon. To the glowing orange eyes we couldn’t see, but felt in our bones. To counter the call of The Daemon - a deep, guttural growl we knew we heard, rippling through the still night air. '' ''That night, I was a warrior. A hero. A being capable of staring down otherworldly monsters and walking away victorious. ***** I definitely didn’t walk away from that Starbucks feeling like a warrior. I felt overwhelmed. And a little sick. As soon as I got home, I pulled out my journal and looked over Mathilde’s rhyme again. Now that I had one piece of the puzzle, the others readily tumbled together. “Up, down, up, down, side to side.” Like a joystick. Like the arcade games Kevin Gideon kept at Atomic Video. “Who would have known? So many places to hide.” The crawlspace, where he’d hidden Micah’s sweater and inhaler. “Can’t make it through the front so you’ll have to climb, nobody will find what you hid in the slime.” That verse was still a mystery. “You’ll find it where the dead children cry.” Mathilde was sending me to the abandoned, under-construction storefront that had once been Atomic Videos. To look for something powdery, grainy, and white. ***** I spent the rest of the day scheming - and discarding - strategy after strategy to complete Phase Two of Mathilde’s rat maze. Sneaking into my own shed was one thing, breaking and entering in the grown-up world, contending with the possibility of witnesses and the probability of a security system, called for significant leveling up. In the end, I came back to the only criminal trick I had in my arsenal - jimmy the lock with a bobby pin and pray there wasn’t an alarm. I binge-watched animated movies on my laptop for awhile, family crap with lots of talking animals and primary colors, until the bright spots dancing in the corner of my vision became too distracting. Then, I went to the mall. It wasn’t crowded, but the shadow people kept on peeking out from behind the small pods of browsing retirees and women with strollers. I was itchy. Itchy all over. Then I found a cocker spaniel with no collar hiding under the clothes racks at JC Penny. I tried to grab the dog, but it ran into the shoe section. I looked under the chairs and display tables for a few minutes, then I asked a salesgirl if she’d seen a dog. She stared at me like I was crazy, so I deduced there had never been a dog, and that coming to the mall was a bad idea. By 11:30 at night, my mind was slightly calmer. Alicia had gone to bed. I considered taking the shovel for a good ten minutes before concluding that would be idiotic. I thought about taking a knife for another quarter hour, decided it wasn’t a completely stupid idea, but in the rather likely case I was caught I didn't want to be caught with a weapon. In the end, my entire toolkit fit in my pocket - a few bobby pins and my cell phone. I slipped out, shut the front door quietly, and drove. In classic suburban style, every business in town was closed for the night. As I pulled into the shopping center, I noted, with some relief, that even the McDonalds had shut its drive-thru. That was the only one I’d worried about. And I doubted anyone would be taking a midnight stroll through an empty parking lot. Then, I remembered that some jobs require hanging around empty parking lots at midnight. A boxy ambulance stalled right in front of the storefront I planned on breaking into. Fuck. I pulled into the nearest parking spot and turned off my car, praying they hadn’t seen me. Maybe I was overreacting, I thought - they were EMTs from the local BLS outfit, not firefighters, and definitely not cops. Still, though, they couldn’t ignore a shaky white chick prowling around a strip mall, and they wouldn’t hesitate to call the proper authorities if they caught said shaky white chick jacking a lock with a bobby pin. Why did they have to be parked directly across from Formerly-Atomic-Videos? I leaned back in the driver’s seat. My second weapon would just have to wait a day. There was a tap at the passenger-side window. Mathilde was standing outside. I blinked. I pinched myself. I breathed in deeply, and didn’t smell Colonel Lewis’s compost heap. When I looked back, Mathilde was no longer at my window. More confused than frightened, I climbed out of my car, and saw her standing a short distance away, leaning against the wall of the Ralph’s. With one dainty finger, she beckoned to me. I went to her. She ran off, along the far side of Ralphs. I followed her fleeing form, her ice-blonde hair catching the waxing moonlight like flax. I followed her around the supermarket, past the loading dock and the row of blue dumpsters, behind the strip mall, to the back lot - a narrow, dead-ended alley with a single row of parking spaces, squished between the black stucco of the strip mall and a high brick wall. Only employees ever parked back there, and few of them. Like deja vu, I knew where I was going. I recognized the little blue door that was the employee entrance to Atomic Videos. But Mathilde ran past it, ran as far as the dead end - a lower, perpendicular cinderblock wall. There was an office complex on the other side. I noticed another trash dumpster there, a smaller one, one that would need to be rolled to the other side of the Ralphs on trash day because there was no way the garbage truck could fit in the alley. Mathilde climbed on top of it. From the dumpster lid, she hopped onto the cinderblock wall. She looked back at me, porcelain smile angelic. Then she jumped. I ran after her. Breathing through my mouth, I mounted the dumpster and peered over the wall. Unsurprisingly, Mathilde was gone. I was on my own. But surprisingly, the rush of Deja Vu came again. I knew what I was doing. There was a narrow valley between the side of the strip mall and the wall. I balanced atop the cinderblocks and took small, cautious steps towards a little ladder mounted on the outer side of the complex. I clambered up the ladder. I was on the roof. “Can’t make it through the front, so you’ll have to climb.” Staying low, I scurried along the roof of the strip mall until I came to a handle. I pulled the handle. A trap door opened. ****** I’ll spare you the details of my rat shit-lined shimmy through the horizontal air vent. I will say that I considered shimmying backwards, climbing down the ladder, hopping off the dumpster, driving home, and watching Friends until the sun came up at least five times. And it really wasn’t a long crawl. I was terrified of running into a lost creature of the creeping variety, and hosted horrific visions of the trapdoor slamming shut and locking behind me and my starved, liquefying corpse being found by some unfortunate construction worker when I started to smell. It was dark. The light from the open trap door did little to cut through the metal tunnel. Then, something quivered under the weight of my palm. I dislodged a loose ceiling tile. I lowered myself to the surface below me - luckily, a carpenter’s table rather than the floor. I was in a small, unassuming, undecorated room. It had once been the Adults Only section of Atomic Video. Then, I had a nauseating thought. Micah’s red sweater and prescription inhaler were found stuffed in a crawlspace behind a dislodged ceiling tile. This was the crawlspace. Mathilde had led me to a crime scene - the place where the pivotal piece of evidence in my best friend’s murder investigation had been hidden. I climbed off the table. I wandered into the main area of the store. The paneling on the walls had been pulled away, and the floor was bare plaster. Was I about to stumble upon Micah’s decomposed remains? My blood pressure rose, then logic kicked in. The storefront had been remodeled numerous times since Micah’s disappearance - after the police had been over every inch of it. If Kevin Gideon had found a place within Atomic Videos to hide the violated body of my best friend, if would have been found long ago. The store was your typical cluttered construction site - worktables set up and littered with abandoned tools, dislodged insulation, half-finished water bottles. Unopened packs of tiles piled in a corner. Torn-out wood paneling strewn across the floor. My second weapon was easy enough to find. There were three bags of powdered concrete tossed against an eviscerated wall; one was open. I stuffed handfuls in my jacket pockets, leaving me covered in floury dust. This had to be it - I could see nothing else powdery, grainy, and white. I had no idea what use powdered concrete could possibly be against the orange-eyed tree monster Mathilde was apparently prepping me to fight. Actually, I had no idea what purpose this semi-legal scavenger hunt served at all. Mathilde could have just sent me to a Home Depot. As I puzzled over my ghostly companion’s intentions, I heard something. Something that sounded a lot like a large form sliding through the air vent. Heart pounding, I ran back to the backroom. Then my body numbed. Someone… something… hung, like a demented slug, halfway out the hole in the ceiling. Blue-and-grey mottled fingers attached to rotting arms, moldy skin hung off ragged, grayish bones. Torn blue shirt, drenched in blood, stuck to a wrinkled grey torso, dripping maggots from a fermenting hole, exposing cracked ribs. Face - what had once been a face - mottled blue. Lips eaten away, swollen black tongue lolling from a decomposing, exposed jaw. Stringy dark hair, coated with congealed blood. Right above its cauliflower, nibbled right ear was a violent crack, leaking grey liquid mixed with blood. Its yellow, bloodshot eyes were alive. Those eyes. I still see them when I close mine, and I know I always will. In the moment, though, what horrified me the most was that the person, the thing, the decomposing zombie that had followed me to an abandoned construction site at midnight - was someone I once knew. Kevin Gideon. As I stood, frozen in horror, Kevin - the Kevin-thing - dropped, like a persistent cockroach, onto the same carpenter’s table as I had, catching itself with its hands. The force of the landing, with a sickening CRUNCH, forced its ulnas through its ragged skin. A smell like rotting meat assaulted me. Zombie-Kevin kept moving. Like a smashed insect, he dragged himself across the table with his mottled, rotting hands. His legs - wrapped in jeans stained with a dark substance - didn’t appear to work, and hung uselessly behind him. His yellow, maniacal eyes fixed on me. When he made the drop from the table to the floor, I ran. I ran like a horror-movie vixen, stumbling over discarded paneling, to the front door. The locked front door. The lock I couldn’t find. I looked behind me, and back into Zombie Kevin’s eyes. He was making progress across the wooden planks. Overtaken by hysteria, the stink of Zombie-Kevin’s putrefying body unbearable, I screamed. Screamed again and again. Rattled the door, kicked, screamed for somebody, anybody, to let me out! Something grabbed my ankle. I whirled, stumbled, fell and landed on my ass. I was eye-to-eye with the thing. Its hand, icy and moist, wrapped around my bare flesh. It opened its mouth. Maggots dripped onto my shoes. Through the massive hole in its skull, I could see insects feeding on its rotten brain. I pulled back my free leg; aimed my foot at the ruined mouth. With a SNAP, I connected. I felt pressure, sickening moisture, and then the head was skittering across the exposed concrete floor. The grip on my ankle abated. The body collapsed. Bugs - ants, worms, beetles - crawled out from the grey-green, fleshy nub to which the head had once been attached. I leaned back on my hands, away from the deluge of insects. My fingers brushed something - a latch at the bottom of the door. I turned it. In one movement, I pulled myself to my feet with the handle and pushed. I half-stepped, half-fell into the night air, slamming the door behind me. A minute of frantic hyperventilating later, I remembered the brick-shaped ambulance that forced me to seek out the back entrance in the first place. It was no longer there. Besides my car, the parking lot was empty. It was possible they’d been sent out on a call. But I truly believed there had never really been an ambulance. Just like there was never… I pulled the door open. I surveyed the disorderly construction site, and found no maggots or crawling bugs. No leaking, decapitated body. No decomposing head. Just a dream. Just a dream. Then it came, echoing across the empty parking lot, over the dark rooftops. A groan. A roar. A ground-shaking howl like a freight train. The call, ageless and endless, forever malevolently furious, of a monster awoken. ***** Next Chapter *****